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Sparks

The Arctic Is Hot and Full of Algae

Climate is changing in weird ways up there.

The Arctic.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

As climate world fixated this week on the final wranglings at COP28, the researchers studying our changing planet delivered more bad news about the Arctic.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 18th annual Arctic Report Card was packed this year with words like “exceptional,” “extreme,” “unprecedented,” and “uncharted,” as one of the harshest places on Earth continues to melt and bloom before our eyes.

Arctic sea ice contracted in 2023 to the sixth-lowest level in the satellite record as the region sweltered under its hottest summer and sixth-hottest year ever documented. Record low May snow cover in North America was followed by the worst season in the history of Canada’s Northwest Territories, where over 16,000 square miles — an area almost twice the size of New Jersey — burned, displacing about two-thirds of residents over the course of the summer. Scandinavia, meanwhile, experienced its wettest August yet, as heavy storms triggered landslides and sent rivers spilling over their banks.

“This year is the year when things are really turning,” Tero Mustonen, an environmental researcher in Finland who contributed to the report, told The New York Times. “The north is now in a place where things will rapidly shift.”

There’s more to the transformation than disappearing glaciers and rising seas, though. Funkier things are happening, too.

Rising ocean temperatures pose a growing risk of melting — and releasing the carbon dioxide and methane trapped in — close to 400,000 square miles of underwater permafrost. Marine algae is thriving in the warmer waters, with its abundance in the Eurasian Arctic rising by 57% over the last two decades and once-rare harmful algal blooms becoming more frequent. Vegetation is also proliferating on land in the tundra, which has seen all eight of its greenest years in the satellite record since 2010 and marked its third-greenest year in 2023.

And while chinook and chum salmon populations crash, devastating Alaskan fisheries, there are more sockeye returning than fishermen know what to do with. In 2022, the number of sockeye in Bristol Bay was nearly double the 30-year mean.

With 2023 now confirmed as the world’s hottest year in modern history, the scientists behind the report also warn that it’s only a matter of time before the unrelenting pace of climate change in the Arctic is felt by the rest of the globe.

“The Arctic is now more relevant to us than it has ever been before,” NOAA administrator Rick Spinrad told NPR. Much of the things happening in the Arctic, he said, are “the kinds of impacts that we're going to see elsewhere in the country” in the not-so-distant future.

“What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic,” he said.

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Sparks

These 21 House Republicans Want to Preserve Energy Tax Credits

For those keeping score, that’s three more than wanted to preserve them last year.

The Capitol.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Those who drew hope from the letter 18 House Republicans sent to Speaker Mike Johnson last August calling for the preservation of energy tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act must be jubilant this morning. On Sunday, 21 House Republicans sent a similar letter to House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith. Those with sharp eyes will have noticed: That’s three more people than signed the letter last time, indicating that this is a coalition with teeth.

As Heatmap reported in the aftermath of November’s election, four of the original signatories were out of a job as of January, meaning that the new letter features a total of seven new recruits. So who are they?

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Green
Sparks

The Country’s Largest Power Markets Are Getting More Gas

Three companies are joining forces to add at least a gigawatt of new generation by 2029. The question is whether they can actually do it.

Natural gas pipelines.
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Two of the biggest electricity markets in the country — the 13-state PJM Interconnection, which spans the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest, and ERCOT, which covers nearly all of Texas — want more natural gas. Both are projecting immense increases in electricity demand thanks to data centers and electrification. And both have had bouts of market weirdness and dysfunction, with ERCOT experiencing spiky prices and even blackouts during extreme weather and PJM making enormous payouts largely to gas and coal operators to lock in their “capacity,” i.e. their ability to provide power when most needed.

Now a trio of companies, including the independent power producer NRG, the turbine manufacturer GE Vernova, and a subsidiary of the construction firm Kiewit Corporation, are teaming up with a plan to bring gas-powered plants to PJM and ERCOT, the companies announced today.

The three companies said that the new joint venture “will work to advance four projects totaling over 5 gigawatts” of natural gas combined cycle plants to the two power markets, with over a gigawatt coming by 2029. The companies said that they could eventually build 10 to 15 gigawatts “and expand to other areas across the U.S.”

So far, PJM and Texas’ call for new gas has been more widely heard than answered. The power producer Calpine said last year that it would look into developing more gas in PJM, but actual investment announcements have been scarce, although at least one gas plant scheduled to close has said it would stay open.

So far, across the country, planned new additions to the grid are still overwhelmingly solar and battery storage, according to the Energy Information Administration, whose data shows some 63 gigawatts of planned capacity scheduled to be added this year, with more than half being solar and over 80% being storage.

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Sparks

An Emergency Trump-Coded Appeal to Save the Hydrogen Tax Credit

Featuring China, fossil fuels, and data centers.

The Capitol.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

As Republicans in Congress go hunting for ways to slash spending to carry out President Trump’s agenda, more than 100 energy businesses, trade groups, and advocacy organizations sent a letter to key House and Senate leaders on Tuesday requesting that one particular line item be spared: the hydrogen tax credit.

The tax credit “will serve as a catalyst to propel the United States to global energy dominance,” the letter argues, “while advancing American competitiveness in energy technologies that our adversaries are actively pursuing.” The Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association organized the letter, which features signatures from the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Clean Energy Buyers Association, and numerous hydrogen, industrial gas, and chemical companies, among many others. Three out of the seven regional clean hydrogen hubs — the Mid-Atlantic, Heartland, and Pacific Northwest hubs — are also listed.

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